🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet